“Christ, Dolniak. Do you have to be so nice? I feel like a shit.”
“Well, maybe you should a little. I don’t know. But I’d probably have done the same in your place, so I’m not going to rub your face in it.”
Li sighed. “You’re a good egg, Dolniak.”
“I am. And you are, too. Or you would have done a lot slicker job of easing the husband into the picture.”
They were both silent for a moment. He hung in the doorway, obviously
desperate to leave. She thought about having pity on the poor fellow and letting him escape, but then she had a sudden flash of him standing under the trained weapons of the mercenary patrol the other night: his quiet, contained, but unmistakably simmering anger. People got themselves into trouble when they were that angry. And she needed to hear something from him before she turned him loose, even though there was no way to do it without embarrassing him. “Are you all right?” she asked him. “I mean … are you calm enough to walk home without getting into a fight with the first person who asks to see your papers?”
And then, to her relief, he finally showed some trace of normal, healthy, wounded male pride.
“Of course I am,” he said, in a tone obviously meant to make her feel like a fool for thinking there’d been anything going on between them but tongue-in-cheek flirtation. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
It was a silly thing to say. And she was even sillier to have made him say it. And it shouldn’t have made her feel better. But oddly enough, it did.
The rain was falling when Dolniak finally closed out the crime scene and left for the night. It felt like a benediction. It scoured the dust and grime from the streets, and left behind only a clean smell of water and stone that brought back early memories of walking across the lava flows with his parents to the little prefab settlement church in the Monongahela Uplands.
He stopped on a street corner, just beyond the reach of the streetlights, and lifted his face to it. He needed to cool down. The whole city needed to cool down. And he needed to get Catherine Li out of his head. Because if anyone followed him tonight, he was going to have far bigger trouble in his life than an out-of-control murder investigation.
The city was turning into an armed camp. Copters beat through the heavy sky, the whine of their turbines swamped by the nearly constant boom of the overworked orbital launchers. A bomb went off somewhere in the Pit nearly every night now. But in the morning the dog teams and rescue squads were always outnumbered by other
searchers—soldiers without signs and insignia of rank who traveled in teams and wore no identification except the tiny silver corporate logo of Titan Corp. Dolniak knew that those men and women were prosecuting another, much more vicious war—one to control streamspace, where everything in the UN that really mattered happened. And he knew he was locked out of that battle, as irrelevant to it as a blind worm in a crack in the sidewalk watching rush hour commuters surge overhead and unable to make any worm-sense of the vast celestial motion.
Li knew that world. And her knowledge was stamped onto her skin in the silver filigree of her Peacekeeper’s wire job. But he couldn’t ask her about it, no matter how much he wanted to. Because her mere access to that world was a sign of privilege that made it impossible ever to completely trust her. Like the food she’d bought for him the other night. And walking in and out of her fancy hotel long after dark as if curfew were just a game poor people played. And shopping at the PX—a sensual glimpse of privilege that had left him both giddy and terrified.
The rich are another species, the old saying went. And rich people who were born poor are even more dangerous and complicated than the born-and-bred variety. Because you never really know if they’ve switched sides or not—and neither do they.
A troop transport rumbled by, loaded with Peacekeepers. Well, better them than mercenaries. The mercenaries terrified him. He’d come face-to-face with a few of them in the course of his ordinary business downtown, and each time he’d wanted to turn tail and run. There was something in their eyes that made him forget the protection of his detective’s badge, of his official travel papers and concealed-carry permits, of his spotless reputation as a loyal and reliable bureaucrat.
He fingered the badge that gave him the right to be out here alone on the dark streets, felt the reassuring weight of the police-issue pistol in his shoulder holster. UNSec wasn’t stupid. They understood they’d never have the complete loyalty of the local authorities. Not on this planet and probably not on any other. So it was only a matter of time until they tightened the curfew and put the police under the microscope.
And then what would NALA do? How were they going to move people without the cover of night? How were they going to move weapons?
Li would know, with her childhood memories of Compson’s World and her multiple tours of duty in the Syndicate Wars. He grinned at the thought of what she would say if he asked for her advice—let alone if he told her where he was really going right now.
And here he was thinking of her—again, for God’s sake!—instead of watching his back.
He buckled down to business then, and by the time he slipped through the Glencarrick Incline’s Pit-top station and into the quiet residential streets beyond it, he was as sure as a man could be that no one was behind him.
The house was just what he’d imagined it would be when he’d heard the address: clean, modern, antiseptic white hab-mods shipped in by BE relay in the first flush of the Boom Times and surrounded by tasteful landscaping. The families who lived up here were at the top of the local pay scale—or had been until the Drift opened up. They could afford sun, and green grass, and recognizably terran flowers in their gardens. Not to mention private schools and Ring-side-sourced wetware for their children. But what would the poor neighbors say if they could see the cast of hard-luck characters gathered behind the drawn shades of the living room tonight?
Dolniak was too old a hand to commit the unpardonable gaffe of using anyone’s real name. He tried not to even think their names. But he counted at least half a dozen cops intermingled among the office boys and businessmen and colonial administrators. And he noticed how the cops formed their own little island, tellingly stranded between the law-abiding city folk and the others—the hard, weather-beaten uplanders who’d lived outside the law all their lives and looked it. Uplanders and potholers. Oil and water. And the cops something halfway between the two and trusted by neither. Hell of a thing, how people could show their colors just by where they chose to stand in the room. He wondered if anyone else noticed it. Li would have noticed, he told
himself. But then he reminded himself that he couldn’t afford to think about her tonight.
He focused on the meeting going on around him. He listened to the speakers as they followed one another in what seemed like an endless succession. One precinct after another. One neighborhood after another.
It was the names more than the actual substance of the speeches that struck him. The colonists had brought the names with them from Pittsburgh and its surrounding Allegheny Uplands. Windygap and Homestead. St. Clair. Southside Flats. The Crucible. Duquesne Heights and Mount Monongahela and Carrick and Glen Hazel. And Polish Hill, where he’d grown up during the years his parents had shut up the farm for the winter and jammed themselves into a cheap row house in town so he could get whatever meager education Monongahela Pit’s public schools offered. Not much, but more than his uplander parents could give him. That and his unexpected talent in the boxing ring had let him squeak into a coveted civil service job. A ticket out of the Uplands—the only kind of ticket there was unless you were willing to enlist in the Peacekeepers. And he was too much a child of the Crucible to stomach that.
The first settlers had carried those names with them from a country that multinational corporations and their paid politicians had stolen out from under them. And they’d carried more than just names. They’d built something here. They’d become something. Something his parents had stood for in their quiet uplander way. And he was damned if he was going to see it knocked flat by UNSec and its corporate paymasters.
And no one else here was willing to let that happen, either. One by one, the neighborhood units stepped up and offered their plans, their resources, their blood if needed.
Meanwhile Dolniak sat, hands in his pockets, fidgeting with his badge in what he was afraid was becoming a nervous habit. He listened while the talk flowed over him. But all the while he could feel the taut thrum of his muscles ratcheting tighter and tighter; the bitter aftertaste
of something that had seemed sweet and easy and uncomplicated right up until he’d seen the way she looked at the dead man.
Being who and what he was, he took that fury out and gave it a long, hard looking at. He’d watched enough cops back their way into ugly divorces to know that it was no good pretending to be a choirboy. You were what you were. You felt what you felt. You just kept it on a leash. And you watched it carefully—or sooner or later it would catch you by surprise, slip the leash, and land you in real trouble.
It had all started so innocently. Running across her at the crime scene. Noticing the military-grade wetware. Noticing the quiet eyes and the I-could-kill-you-six-ways-before-breakfast charisma. Doing the math and not being able to make it square up with a nobody PI running a nothing case on a backwater planet. Finding out who she was. Finding her dangerously easy to talk to. Starting to crave that appreciative little chuckle he could coax out of her now and then: the one that made you feel like she didn’t laugh for everyone and you’d really earned something. And then the fatal moment when it had crossed his mind, with the usual run-of-the-mill male vanity, that it might be fun to see how the formidable Catherine Li looked when she wasn’t in control of things.
Which was completely crazy, because she wasn’t the kind of woman you picked up and put down at will. She was the kind who picked you up and put you down. And she’d already made it clear, with a few well-timed I’m-old-enough-to-be-your-mother jokes, that he wasn’t worth picking up in the first place.
Really, he should be happy about the husband. He’d known Li was hiding something from him, and he’d been afraid it was a lot worse. From the moment he’d seen the ghostly tracery of ceramsteel beneath her skin, he’d been terrified that she was undercover Political Section and that UNSec was onto him. Tonight’s confession was the first explanation of her presence that made enough sense that he was sure it wasn’t a Political Section cover story. So, really, the husband was good news. Or at least that was what Dolniak’s rational mind kept insisting. But the big dog was still pretty sure it would rather have her shoot him than screw someone else.
And when you started thinking like that, there really was nothing to do but step back and laugh at yourself.
Oh well, he told himself as the meeting broke up and they slunk out into the rain in ones and twos, trying to look inconspicuous. You could have picked a worse person to break your heart. At least she’ll probably have a sense of humor about it.
THE DRIFT
After the battle came shore leave. Not much of a shore leave—just a desperate jump through to an isolated station and a nervous trip into dock past the lineup of hanging pirates left behind on Avery’s last visit.
But the stationers were hanging on just this side of starvation, and Avery had stripped them of everything they could afford to spare—and a lot that they couldn’t. So the stationers kept their mouths shut and took the
Christina
’s fake papers without comment.
And anyway, shore leave was shore leave.
Li was an old soldier. She knew the drill. And she knew that going ashore with Llewellyn was asking for trouble.
But she did it anyway. Lately she was doing a lot of stupid things anyway. And two hours after they made dock, she was sitting in a dingy dockside bar with William Llewellyn, whatever was left of her husband, and two glasses of cheap beer.
Llewellyn was still riding high after the raid, which had—despite the near disaster of Avery’s ambush—bagged them several weeks of air and water and what promised to be a significant shipboard systems upgrade. He was talking more tonight than she’d ever heard him talk—and at some point it dawned on her that he was putting real effort into charming her.
“Is that you flirting with me, or Cohen?”
“Does it matter?” he asked blandly.
“No wonder you two get along so well. You’re just as bad as he is.”
Llewellyn just stretched out his long legs under the table and grinned at her.
“You’re not as cute as you think you are,” she said.
“Sister Joe said that line better.”
“You remember Sister Joe? Seriously?”
“I remember a lot of things.”
“Including some things I’m still trying to forget, apparently.”
He smiled a smile she’d seen on Cohen’s face a thousand times. “What are you trying to forget?” he asked, his voice shading off to velvet around the edges. “Just tell me, and it’ll never cross my lips again.”
“Sly doesn’t suit you, Llewellyn. I like you better when you’re being yourself. And anyway, it’s not going to happen, so you can tell Cohen to stop flirting with me.”
That earned her a flash of his real smile. It was a nice smile, open and intelligent. It made you feel like you could reach back through the accumulated years of discipline and disillusion and touch the bright child he must have been before life savaged him.
“Who said it was Cohen?” he asked mildly.
Shit
, Li thought in some still-clear-thinking part of her increasingly addled backbrain.
How am I going to deal with
this?
But of course she knew perfectly well how she was going to deal with it. She wasn’t a child anymore. And falling into bed with Llewellyn—however easy it might be to rationalize—would only compound whatever havoc Cohen was wreaking on him.
“Listen,” she told him, looking him straight in the eye and making sure there wasn’t so much as a whisper of innuendo in her voice. “I like you. Enough to be truly sorry that Cohen dragged you into this.”